Which Questions Each Answers

Both techniques are frequently deployed before anyone states the question. This is the mapping.

Process mining answers

How many distinct paths does this process actually take?

How long does a case take, and how much of that is waiting?

Where do cases queue?

How often does a case return to a step it already passed?

Which cases deviate from the designed path, and how many?

Who hands work to whom, and where does it bounce?

Did the change we made alter the process, measurably?

All from system records, all aggregable, none requiring individual attribution.

Task mining answers

What happens between two system events?

Which applications are involved in this step, and for how long?

Where is data being moved by hand between systems?

Which keyboard sequences repeat often enough to automate?

Why does this step take twenty minutes when the system shows one transaction?

All requiring capture on individual machines, with the obligations that follow.

Neither answers

Why a person made a decision. The log shows the decision, not the reasoning.

Whether the process should exist. That is a design judgement.

Whether a variant is wrong. Deviation is not error; many variants are correct responses to circumstances the design did not anticipate.

What the customer experienced, unless the customer-facing events are in the log.

Whether people are working hard. Both techniques are frequently misread this way, and the misreading is the fastest route to a failed deployment.

What will happen if you change something, with any reliability. Simulation makes claims here that deserve scepticism.

Choosing the starting point

Start with process mining in almost every case. It uses data you already have, needs no consent process, and frequently answers the question outright.

Add task mining only where the process log has a measured gap and the question sits inside it.

Measure the gap first: what proportion of case duration falls between events with no recorded activity. If that proportion is small, task mining will not tell you much.

The order that avoids trouble

Question, then log, then discovery, then the gap measurement, then — if justified — task mining.

Deployments that run this backwards install desktop capture across a department, generate a consultation problem, and produce findings the system log would have given for free.

Writing the question down

The discipline that prevents most wasted deployments.

One sentence, before any extraction: what decision will this analysis inform.

Name who will act on the answer.

Name what result would change their mind, which is the check that reveals whether the decision is already made.

Name the case level the question implies, since that constrains the log.

Circulate it, and expect the question to change once someone senior reads it — which is much cheaper before the extraction than after.